|
HASHIM
squinted before pulling the trigger. Although the
19-year-old is used to holding Soviet-made AK-47 assault
rifles in the deep jungles of Mindanao three years back,
this particularly weapon was new to him.
“It gives
a different feeling; far, far different from what I held
before,” Hashim [not his real name] says as he tests the
weight of the welding gun in his hand before working on
some steel bars.
For Hashim,
the welding gun represents a different set of skills. “The
last one was to destroy; this here’s for building,” he
tells BusinessMirror.
The
restless cadence of anger amid the poverty of Hashim’s
village in North Cotabato, numbing the creative spirits of
young Filipinos like him, has mellowed down, thanks to the
persistence of civic groups like Alternative Planning
Initiatives Inc. (Alterplan) and Habitat for Humanity
Philippines Inc.
Hashim
mentions one of Alterplan’s architects who, he says,
remained in their village despite the armed conflict.
“They stayed there to allow refugees to stay in the houses
they and the community built,” Hashim explains in Tagalog.
After that
episode, he ditched his rifle.
Today,
Hashim is one of two dozen out-of-school youths who built
eight midrise residential buildings in Taguig. They would
build two more buildings before the year ends, staying for
nearly a year here far from their families in the South.
“It’s hard
work, but decent,” says Henry Galunsag, Hashim’s colleague
from Midsayap, Cotabato.
Galunsag
adds that at least they are earning and are able to send
money back to their families compared with before, when
“we were just idle, spending our time waiting for money to
fall from the sky.”
He says
they are also able to save and that most of them plan to
go back to school if there are no more job offers for them
as masons, carpenters and steel-frame workers.
Skills
training
Galunsag
and Hashim are two of 300 young people displaced from
schools by war and poverty who have been trained by
Alterplan and Habitat architects and engineers for two
months. The project, Called Civil Trades Training in
Conflict-Affected Areas in Mindanao, began in April 2006
and ended March this year.
Working on
a P5.3-million grant plus P9.9 million in internally
generated funds, Alterplan and Habitat trained these
out-of-school youths, aged 17 to 24, who are either from
internally displaced communities or were former
combatants.
A total of
250 graduates came from Region 12 in
Mindanao, while 50 came from Guimaras province in the Visayas.
Fifty percent of the graduates cited Islam as their
religion, while 35 percent, or 67 graduates, said they
were Roman Catholic. More than half or 129 graduated from
high school and/or reached tertiary education levels,
while 89 only finished elementary education and 21 or 7
percent said they failed to graduate.
After a
year, most obtained government certifications in general
masonry and 232 youths were hired by Habitat for its
projects in Leyte, General Santos City and Manila.
Alterplan
executive director Sarah Redoblado notes that, having
passed a four-module training, these young people are
considered skilled workers.
Aside from
carpentry and masonry, Hashim, Galunsag and their fellow
graduates were also trained in plumbing and electrical
roughing-in, tinsmithry, steel framing, CIB fabrication,
as well as on occupational safety and health.
The
schooling, Redoblado says, takes about five weeks,
including on-the-job training with Habitat. Some have gone
for additional training as draftsmen for a month while 10
underwent and passed a trainer’s training program.
In its
briefing paper, Alterplan says they chose this age group
because it comprises a fifth of the country’s total
population.
In
Soccksargen or Region 12, where training was concentrated
in 2006, the share of the unemployed to total population
over 15 years old in the labor force is at 6.36 percent,
Alterplan notes. Citing government data, Alterplan says
that high-school undergraduates comprised 60.97 percent of
the region’s total population over 15 years old. And a
quarter of those at the 15 to 24 age bracket failed to
finish the elementary level.
Violent
conflict in villages across the region “has robbed people
of opportunities to learn, hone their skills or engage in
economically productive activities,” the group says.
But aside
from poverty and war, one major challenge confronts
Redoblado’s group, which they fear could entice Hashim and
the other graduates to return to what they turned their
backs on. “We’re worried about the market,” Redoblado
tells BusinessMirror.
Disparities in access
THE
market, as it is, is booming.
Never has
the
Philippines
experienced a second wind in the property sector than at
this juncture, a decade after a currency crisis in the
region nearly broke the back of the housing industry.
Today,
construction is rolling at a maddening pace, so much so
that property broker firm CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) said
supply of materials and equipment would remain lagging
behind demand until 2010.
National
Statistical Coordination Board data show that gross value
added (GVA) in construction rose by 21 percent for the
first half of the year compared with the same period last
year. The GVA, which serves as the performance indicator
of an industry, zoomed to P29.88 billion from P24.77
billion last year.
“Construction activity is expected to be strong in the
next three years given the confirmed projects in both the
public and private sector,” the CBRE said.
Still,
with underemployment a constant fixture of the Philippine
labor market, the worries of Alterplan’s executive
director lie on what she sees as the lack of this market’s
readiness in riding the soaring demand.
Some
analysts point to the absence of a clear-cut government
program to define the country’s industry focus and the
skill set that it needs to develop in the labor force,
especially among the working-age population. A report by
the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia
and the Pacific (Unescap) has, as early as seven years
ago, pointed this out.
“Disparities in access to education, employment
conditions, health and involvement in national political
processes exist among different groups of Filipino youth,”
noted the Unescap report titled “Youth in the Philippines:
A Review of the Youth Situation and National Policies and
Programs.” “As a result, access and equity remain major
concerns for policymakers in the areas of youth education,
employment, health and public participation.”
Seven
years later, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFP)
would emphasize the same concern, saying in its World
Population Report 2007 that “investment in young people is
the key to ending generations of poverty.”
“Unemployed young people make up almost half [43.7
percent] of the world’s total unemployed. Young people are
more than three times as likely to be unemployed as
adults,” the UNFP said.
The
international development agency also warned that “when
young people seeking work fail to find productive, decent
livelihoods, they can enter or continue a cycle of
poverty, with high rates of unemployment across their life
spans.”
“There has
been increasing concern among policymakers that the
frustrations accompanying long-term unemployment among
large populations of young men…may feed political and
ideological unrest and provoke violence,” the UNFP added.
Government’s role
“IT should
be on a grand scale,” International Youth Foundation (IYF)
chief executive William S. Reese told BusinessMirror when
asked how these concerns could be addressed and if the
market is really an avenue for the responses.
Reese, who
flew from Baltimore to identify funding potentials for
out-of-school youth, said that while he sees groups like
Alterplan and Habitat doing good, the “world can’t be
changed by organizations.”
“Governments, like yours, must learn how to prioritize,
especially in spending money; money that came from
taxpayers,” Reese said. “Instead of spending them on
‘silly things,’ the Philippine government can look into
what these groups are doing and support them by, for
example, expanding education and employment opportunities,
especially in Mindanao.”
While he
didn’t cite these “silly things,” Reese arrived during the
time lawmakers are probing million-dollar cyber-education
and telecommunications projects.
For Reese,
however, the simpler programs that worked—the so-called
best practice—are better.
“We’re
satisfied enough these young people learn life skills,
like dressing right, having a work routine and work ethic,
because then they feel good about their self and they
become more confident to face life and consider the
options it offers,” said Reese glancing at Hashim’s group.
Like
Redoblado, Reese knows that temptations lurk for Hashim
and other young Filipinos like him to entice them to
return to the fray and wallow of poverty engulfing
villages in interior
Mindanao. As the UNFP report said, over the next decade, 1.2 billion
young women and men like Hashim will enter the working-age
population.
“They will
be the best-educated and best-trained generation ever,
with great potential for economic and social development,
if countries can find uses for their skills, enthusiasm
and creativity; otherwise, they will be condemned to
poverty, like many of their parents are,” the UNFP report
warned.
Phase two
REDOBLADO
says they’re taking UNFP’s warning seriously: her group of
architects and planners are now in its second phase of
training young people like Hashim and, for the first time,
women.
According
to Redoblado, with the Consuelo Foundation’s commitment
for building on out-of-school training for enhanced job
security and professionalization of the construction
sector, they feel the project could succeed.
This is a
one-year extension of Alterplan’s project.
The
agreement, funded by the US Agency for International
Development through Reese’s group, the IYF, seeks to
continue providing training and links to employment for
300 out-of-school youths in
Mindanao.
An
additional 300 out-of-school young men and women are
expected to participate and benefit from the replication
of the civil-trades training activities in the Luzon and
Visayas regions.
For now,
they are enjoying the peace that came with the
accomplishment of the project’s first phase—having built
six of the eight three-story clusters of houses here in
the Food Terminal Inc. compound.
“It’s a
different feeling, to have accomplished this much with
this much number of people helping,” Hashim says.
He gazes
across the chicken-wire fence where 144 families helping
build each of the 12 26-sq-m units for every medium-rise
town house they would call home before the year ends.
White
powdery dust on the 6,000-sq-m lot momentarily swirls and
snaps Hashim from his reverie, maybe of his family back in
Mindanao.
He excuses
himself and goes back to welding steel braces.
Again, he
pulls the trigger of the welding gun and sparks fly,
seemingly from his chest—his tinderbox of hope. |
